The linguistic variety of Canada has been enhanced by migration. Canada’s statics stated that 4.6 million Canadians use their native language to speak rather than English or French. In 2021, 9 million Canadians, or 1 in 4, had a native language other than English or French. Since Statistics Canada started to incorporate information on native languages in its records in 1901, this represents a remarkable high. Of course, the two most common languages in Canada are still English and French. Over 90% of Canadians frequently use either of the two national languages at home.
Immigration has led to linguistic diversity
Canada’s people who don’t speak English or French at home are becoming more prevalent due to immigration. From 2016 to 2021, a considerable increase in the proportion of Canadians whose primary language at home was a South Asian language.
While the population of Canada increased by 5.2% between 2016 and 2021, the proportion of Canadians who spoke a South Asian language at home increased significantly more quickly. especially those who spoke Malayalam (+129%), Hindi (+66%), Punjabi (+49%), and Gujarati (+43%). In contrast to the overall growth rate of Canadians, the number of South Asian language speakers has increased at a rate that is at least eight times higher. A quarter of the newcomers to Canada’s permanent population between 2016 and 2020 came from South Asian nations, and one in five was born in India, which is substantially to blame for this growth.
Mandarin and Punjabi were the two languages that were most often spoken in Canada, excluding English and French. Over 500,000 Canadians spoke Punjabi at home in 2021, while over 500,000 spoke Mandarin at home. The proportion of Canadians whose primary language at home was a European language also decreased during this time. A large majority of these language, speakers were immigrants to Canada before 1980. This decline is mostly due to their older population. Additionally, there haven’t been many recent immigrants to Canada from Poland, Italy, or Greece.
A significant metropolitan center was more likely to be home to Canadians who spoke another language than English and French rather than to other Canadians. Large urban areas receive a sizable share of the immigrants that migrate to Canada annually. This broadens their language variety. In Canada, there are more than 70 different official languages. In 2021, 189,000 persons claimed to speak at least one Indigenous language as their mother tongue, while 183,000 claimed to regularly use an Indigenous language at home.
Among Canada’s indigenous languages, Cree and Inuktitut are the most common.
English and French
At least one of Canada’s two official languages is spoken by the vast majority of its citizens. In 2021, 98.1% of Canadians were able to communicate in both English and French, and 92.9% regularly used either language at home. Only little more than three out of four Canadians use English as their first language, an increase from 2016. Additionally, more than 50% of the inhabitants of the nation spoke English as their first language.
More and more Canadians are speaking French as their first official language. In 2021, more than 1 in 5 Canadians regularly spoke French at home. In British Columbia, the percentage of Canadians who spoke French as their first language increased. Between 2016 and 2021, it increased in the Yukon, and Quebec, while it fell in other provinces and territories. The paper claims that this decline is brought on by a number of elements, including linguistic transfers, an average older population, and insufficient French transmission from one generation to the next.
In Quebec, the number of persons who speak English as their first language has surpassed 1 million for the first time. While the percentage of bilingual Canadians who speak both English and French has stayed essentially stable since 2016. Additionally, although there are more French speakers in Quebec, their percentage is falling.
